Soapbox

The Economist has an excellent article on how Indian mobile phone companies cut costs. They have an ARPU of $6.50 a month yet operate with a 40% gross margin. If US cellcos were run as efficiently, they would have a 1200% gross margin on the $51 monthly ARPU!

The time has long come to stop coddling grossly inefficient and anti-competitive cellular carriers in the West. They are no longer fledgling businesses in the shadow of landlines, quite the opposite, in fact. One good place to start would be to require them to offer consumers the choice of carrier for international calls and for roaming, as is the case with landlines. Their rates are simply extortionate.

I have an eight-core Nehalem Mac Pro. Most of these cores sit idle most of the time due to poorly written software that is not optimized for the post-Moore multicore world.

I am beginning to wonder if Intel’s transistor budget wouldn’t be better allocated to more SRAM cache instead of more cores. One SRAM bit uses up 4 transistors, the Xeon 5500 have 751 million transistors, of which 8Mx8x4 or 256 million are for the 8MB L3 cache. If the chip were brought down from quad-core to dual-core, that would allow doubling the cache. Many programs could run entirely from cache, including interpreters.

My old apartment had a flag in its back yard, apparently the flag pole and bench was a memorial for a Marine killed in combat. After September 11, when all flags were supposed to be struck in mourning, that one flag hadn’t been lowered, so I went and drew it down to half-mast, with proper honors. You would think there would be at least one US citizen around who would care enough so a French one did not have to…

The flag seems to crystallize a lot of posturing on both sides of the political spectrum in the US, but people are woefully ignorant of proper flag code. It prohibits wearing the flag as apparel, for instance (except for duly authorized personnel like the military), or its use for advertising purposes (the biggest flags around seem to be those on car dealerships). Burning is also the recommended form of disposal for a worn flag (respectfully, of course).

A 33% hike in Muni fares was announced today. This will hit the poorest people in the city first, and to add insult to injury, this is accompanied with cuts in service.

San Francisco has a budget of over $6B, about the same size as much larger cities as Chicago or Paris, and exceeding the budget of 20 of the US states. It also exceeds the entire GNP of countries like Mongolia or Georgia (in the Caucasus). San Franciscans get little to show for it in services.

One reason why: SF has over 8,000 city employees making over $100,000 a year (the head of Muni is one of them, making $325,000, or more than US Cabinet ministers who make $191,000). The share of the city budget spent on those high flyers is over $1B…

After eight years of a automobile-free life in San Francisco, I bought a car in December 2007. Acxiom had relocated us from our lovely downtown San Francisco office (a 15 minute walk from home) to the outer boondocks of Foster City (viable transit options: none). Before I started commuting, I simply could not fathom the point of podcasts. Now, I understand where they can be useful, but they are still not my cup of tea.

The main reason why is that podcasts are like the remaindered bin at a bookstore (remember them?). Sure, it is fun to rummage through them in search of a bargain, but usually you don’t find the books you really want there, and if you value your time as you should, it is not a productive investment thereof. Audiovisual media like podcasts force you to take them in at their speed, unlike the written word that can be scanned efficiently for triage. The so-called rich media are actually low in information value, “rich” should really be construed as in “rich foods”, i.e. pejoratively.

Audible, the downloadable audiobook company, has a promotion where they are giving away a free copy of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I was thinking of salvaging the daily 60 to 90 minutes of my life I lose to commuting by listening to books that I actually want, perhaps even learn a new language, and Dr. Covey’s often frighteningly earnest self-help book seemed to fit the bill for a test run. I soon found my attention would wander back to the road and I found it impossible to concentrate on the book, a good thing, I guess.

Back to classical music it is…